Experimental religion, which once was a vital part of the Reformed tradition of preaching and spirituality, has in a large measure been lost sight of in our day. Even use of the term experimental in connection with religion is no longer customary, it being more commonly associated with the natural sciences, where a method of probing and investigation leads to an understanding of reality. The older Reformed writers used the word to indicate that we not only read and confess what Scripture teaches, but also are enabled by the Holy Spirit in our own experience to prove and enter into those truths. The propositions of Scripture are true regardless of our experience of them. But in those who belong to Christ, there is a work of the Holy Spirit to persuade them of those truths, so that they taste and feel the power of them in their own souls.
From the outset, the sixteenth-century Scottish Reformed Church was firm in its pursuit of tutoring and examining communicants, and this preparation intensified in the weeks leading up to the administration of the Lord’s Supper. The First Book of Discipline (1560) enjoined, “All ministers must be admonished to be more careful to instruct the ignorant than ready to serve their appetite and to use more sharp examination than indulgence in admitting to that great Mystery such as be ignorant of the use and virtue of the same. And therefore we think that the administration of the Table ought never to be without examination passing before and specially of them whose knowledge is suspect.”
We may consider three senses in which the Scottish Presbyterian tradition has employed the term constitution. George Gillespie, writing in 1641, frequently alludes to individual laws and regulations of the church as constitutions. The same sense of the word is found in the Church of Scotland’s Barrier Act of 1697. Alexander Henderson, also writing in 1641, uses the word to designate the characteristic form, composition and membership of the church’s superior courts. From these and similar usages, the modern meaning of the term, signifying a body of fundamental principles with which all other legislation must harmonize, gradually emerged during the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and and drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
We read in scripture of those who believe the word of God, and yet are not saved, as in Luke 8:13: “They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away,” or in Acts 26:27–28: “King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know that thou believest. Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” Or James 2:19: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” Faith of a certain kind, constrained by evidence, will be found even in those who hate the truth with which they are confronted. Gardiner Spring comments, “We receive, compound, and compare ideas, whether we wish to or not. When we see the evidence of a religious doctrine to be clear and convincing, we cannot withhold our assent from it, while at the same time we may hate what we believe and love what we reject.”
